Johnny's Gone To Vietnam

The above is a soul record so obscure I can't even remember who wrote or sang it. It'll come to me. Anyway, I only used that title because it's evocative of an era.
Lots of American blacks were in singing groups, and lots of them were conscripted into the army to fight in Vietnam. Ergo, there are a lot of soul songs about the Vietnam War.
My favourite is probably by The Creations. It's called 'Just Remember Me' and it's the lament of a young soldier going off to fight Charlie and worrying that his girl will have forgotten about him if he ever makes it back. (Sadly, it's not on soulclub.org - if you manage to track it down somewhere else, it's well worth a listen.)
Anyway. I wonder how many lads from Walthamstow, or Belfast, or Maesteg, or Galashiels, are presently hunkering down behind sandbags in Afghanistan, low on ammunition, hugely outnumbered, hungry and thirsty, wondering whether they'll make it home?
Pass the Kevlar, sarge. What's that? We've got no Kevlar?

How is Blair still in power?

That Was The Whiskey Talkin'

I was in Ireland over the weekend on an extended stag do. I was mostly smashed out of my face, hence the above title/song (Ronnie Forte, obscure r&b from 1963-ish, listen to it on soulclub.com as usual).

I noticed several things.

1. Irish women are a lot more attractive than I remembered. But then, I'm getting older.
2. I can't drink as much as I once could.
3. When I do drink a lot, I talk utter shite.

Oh, and the Irish are a lot more friendly these days. But when forty drunken Englishmen start playing drinking games in a small bar at 1am, and you hear someone say, 'Have ye still got that Armalite, Paddy?', it's time to move on.

Sitting In My Class

The above (hear it at www.soulclub.org) is a rare and very expensive Detroit soul track on the obscure De-To label. It was recorded, slightly tunelessly, by Ronnie McNeir in 1966 and a decent copy will cost you close to £1,000 now.

I mention it for two reasons.

1) I've just finished reading a great new book by a chap called Frank Chalk. Chalk is a teacher in an average inner city school and the book - It's Your Time You're Wasting: A Teacher's Tales Of Classroom Hell - sent shivers through me.
Chalk tells us how there's no discipline in his school - he's threatened by the kids and their parents, regularly told to fuck off and gets no support from his head or the LEA.
There's nothing approaching education - he spends a whole lesson teaching the kids how to fill in the boxes for their multiple choice exam questions (without the questions - this is just how to tick the boxes). Another lesson is wasted trying to get them to label their books. French classes are spent drawing pictures.
The kids eat fried food and sweets and drink fluorescent blue muck. Their home lives are shambolic and messy.
Predictably, many of them leave unable to read, write or behave. After more than a decade of education, they are unsocialised, uneducated thugs with no hope, and no future.
It's a depressing read in many ways, though very funny in parts, and I urge you all to buy it (I say 'all'; I think I have about four readers).

2) The second reason for mentioning the Ronnie McNeir track is because it illustrates the horrible decline in black music since the 1960s. Back then, Ronnie could sing about how he was going to fail his exams because he was in love with the beautiful girl in the next row.
Nowadays he'd be rapping about how she was about to become his 'ho' or his 'bitch'. If he didn't die in a drive-by, or get life for a cop-killing, first.
All around us we see tragedy, and yet we recognise it not.

I Don't Have A Mind Of My Own

Did anyone hear Kiera 'Out Of Her' Box on Any Questions this week? Kiera is a Young Person who thinks, like, Young People need to be, like, engaged in the political process, yeah.

Apparently, we need to make politics more accessible, more relevant and more interesting, or else Young people won't vote.

Ah, well. We'll live, sweetheart.

Young People have a choice: Get politicised, or don't. If you don't - because, say, you're too busy going out all night, doing E and shagging each other - well, that's cool with me. I was like that when I was your age after all.

Anyway, it's not as if being 'Young' is a permanent state of affairs, is it? And it's not like they have any real life experience, either. Mostly, they're just gobshite teenagers (mentally, if not physically) with far too much to say for themselves.

One day, they'll be Old People, and then - maybe - they'll be worth listening to.

Until then, we should leave them alone to fester in their miserable hell of sex, drugs and cheap drink. The bastards.

By the way, Kiera Box sounded like a right fucking idiot - I mean, if she's the brightest of the bright, God help us. She could NOT construct a coherent argument (or even sentence).

Oh, and the above is a track by BJ Thomas, from about 1965. Available at soulclub.org.

TTFN.

This Is The Thanks I Get

Tony Blair must be playing this Barbara Lynn track (on Atlantic, £25-ish on eBay on original 45 or you can hear it at soulclub.org) a lot lately.
I suspect he's utterly befuddled at our lack of gratitude, after all he's done for us.
'I've heard that you're gonna leave me,' sings Tony. 'and the rumour is, it's another political charlatan called Dave.'
The Tories, 40% and with a 10 seat majority if they were elected on the basis of those polls tomorrow? These are heady days indeed.
Can anyone explain why it's taken the British public so long to see through Blair, though? And is anyone willing to predict how long the Cameron spin sustains him/the Conservatives?
Honesty. Calling a spade a spade. Anyone remember any of that?

Great front page in the Indy today, by the way. A UK made up of many different flags with the usual pompous blurb at the bottom 'celebrating' the way these people of many nations have created a new Britain.
Hmmm. I wonder how many Indy writers have kids at sink schools, where there are 30 different languages spoken in a class? How many have private health, so they don't have to worry about queues at the GPs? How many are under imminent threat of losing their jobs because journalists from Romania, or the Ukraine, or Somalia, are undercutting them?

A friend accused me of being a racist last week for pointing this out to him. As I said, it's not racism. I don't want third generation Australians, whose maternal and paternal roots are in, say, Bristol, coming over here to avail themselves of our jobs and welfare services, and they're pretty much identical to me (except for their ridiculous accents and silly hair).

Standing At A Standstill

Been on holiday for a week. We wandered around the Lizard and the National Trust beaches of Cornwall with scarcely a metal detector or an Islamic extremist bearing odd liquids in sight. Invest in British holiday firms, I thought to myself. But didn't.

Anyway, the above is a nice, doo-wop influenced song sung by the improbably-named Sherlock Holmes (and his backing group... I think they were 'The Watsons', though I forget). As always, it's at Soulclub.org.

My mind turned to it as I watched the fourth Test descend into chaos (a standstill, literally) yesterday evening.

I don't know whether I've got some sort of secret crystal ball lodged in my head, but I turned to my wife and said, 'This will all turn out to be about racism, the Empire and paternalism'. As opposed to scratching a cricket ball with your thumbnail to make it swing more pronouncedly. The former Pakistan player Ramiz Raja, a commentator on Sky (through whose technology I was viewing the (in)action), was quick out of the blocks. 'This is disgraceful,' he fumed. And he wasn't having a pop at the Pakistani team - he meant the actions of the umpires (who had awarded England's batsmen five penalty runs and a choice of a new ball after deciding that the bowlers were tampering with the ball).

This morning, we had more of the same on Five Live's phone-in.

Talk about a rush to judgment.

My holiday was spent with various left-leaning friends, all of whom opined that the 'dramatic arrests' of 20-odd alleged plane bombers would turn out to be another security services/police farce. This was, of course, without any knowledge of the background (and while, in the same breath, they were, quite rightly, critical of anyone who suggested they were actually terrorists). BECAUSE WE DON'T KNOW. EITHER WAY.

Same with the ball. Was it tampered with? We don't know. But who do you trust? Two umpires with nothing to gain, unless they are corrupt and/or racist, or professional sportsmen who need wickets to win a cricket match?

This Is My Country

As the Impressions sang, some time in the early 1970s. This is a beautiful, cheap (£10) Curtis Mayfield composition which floats by on eBay every day (as always, you can hear it at Soulclub).
It's an impassioned song, aimed squarely at the racism that American blacks experienced back then. "I've paid 300 years or more," sing the boys, "of slave-driving sweat and welts on my back...this is my country."
Hard to argue, especially after watching Monty Panesar and Saj Mahmood take apart Pakistan at Headingley this week (on TV, sadly). I know there are massive differences between the slave history of Curtis Mayfield and Monty Panesar's upbringing in Luton, but it makes you think.
It makes me think, anyway.
When Panesar and Mahmood take their wickets, the sheer joy they show (especially The Montster) and that of their team-mates says one thing: we're English and proud.
It made an interesting contrast with the jeers and barracking of Mahmood by second and third generation English Pakistanis, who called him a traitor and booed as he ran in to bowl.
I don't like racism (for one thing, it's generally exhibited by stupid people; for another, I'm a meritocrat), though I'm against further immigration to this country.
Watching these two proud Englishmen in action will do more to defeat the racists than any amount of hectoring and nannying by this government and their co-religionists at the BBC.

Wake Up To The Sunshine Girl

This is the title of a record by a chap called Joey DeLorenzo. If you can find a copy, expect to pay about £2,000 for it. Strangely, it's not even a soul record - the singer was (is?) white and I believe it was originally recorded as the theme tune to a cornflakes advert. But it's got a great beat and, while soul devotees will argue for ever and a day about whether it's any good, I quite like it. You can hear it at Soulclub.org.
Anyway, it reminds me of all this global warming stuff. I listened with interest to Tim Yeo on Five Live the other day. He and a bunch of other MPs are suggesting that tax on cars and flights ought to be increased dramatically to reduce the remorseless flow of carbon emissions and, thus, assist in the defeat of global warming.
Predictably, Blair has rejected this and, instead, wants us all to own our own carbon emissions and be able to trade them for cash.
This says everything about Blair (and Tim Yeo).
If carbon emissions really are a serious problem and they are, as Yeo suggested, going to destroy the planet, what on earth is he messing around with car tax and cheap flights for? Surely, if he believes what he's saying, he should be working tirelessly to outlaw the sale of large-engined vehicles in the UK and banning holiday flights altogether? I mean, if the future of the planet is really at stake.
Equally, Blair's little carbon trading scheme won't do anything.
Of course, proposing the real solutions to this perceived problem would be (they think) electoral poison. And they're nothing if not short-termist.
For my own part, I'm not sure about global warming. The planet has warmed up before without human intervention, after all. I suspect it may all be a scam designed to divert our money and attention, though I'm persuadable.
I'd certainly be in favour of higher taxes on cars and flights, anyway, as they would almost certainly reduce the numbers of both and, after a few days spent walking on the Warwickshire hills around Ilmington, I do think that cleaner air would be a bonus.
Additionally, air travel should also be restored as the province of the well-off. The chavs can have Blackpool.

PS Thanks to Serf for his email on how to add a 'blogroll'. I'm working on it and also on posting your comment (my first!).